Long ago, in the distant days of 2013, I had an unfashionable opinion: I really disliked “On Smarm,” an essay by Tom Scocca. It was a wide-ranging cultural critique hung on the author’s dislike of Dave Eggers (and, to a lesser extent, Eggers’ literary progeny, Isaac Fitzgerald). It was at its core a weak argument—by 2013, Eggers (as a writer, at least) no longer exerted the cultural influence he had around the time of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), or even Zeitoun (2009). And Scocca’s fixation on Fitzgerald, who is about as well (or little) known as Scocca himself, seemed odd. Unwarranted. Mean.

Reading Arthur Chu’s piece about Gawker’s recent missteps, I remembered that I had written this thing. I think I submitted it exactly one place before I gave up on having it published; even three days into the take cycle it seemed past its expiration date. But Chu’s piece helped me see how “On Smarm” epitomizes the Self-Important Truth-Telling version of Gawker that I find most detestable: the same intransigent, didactic 90s-era Adbusters mode that seems to have fueled the resignations of Max Read and Tommy Craggs.

We make fun of The Believer for its relentless positivity, Slate for its contrived contrarian takes, the NYT for being out of touch, and Gawker for being a total nightmare. There’s something in each of those assessments, but they hardly represent the full truth; they just describe those pubs at their worst. With that in mind it’s worth noting that, in the time since I wrote this, Scocca has written at least one remarkable piece of criticism that I know of—a 2014 piece about Bill Cosby that probably inspired Hannibal Buress to make those now-famous jokes about the serial sex offender…a story that Ta-Nehisi Coates (who was recently named by Nick Denton as his dream editor for Gawker) looked away from.

There have been false dichotomies in criticism since forever, I guess. “On Smarm,” like countless other essays that talk about irony or whatever you want to call it (usually with regard to David Foster Wallace or, less often, Wes Anderson or Sufjan Stevens), heaps praise on a so-called virtue—in this case, snark—and trashes its perceived opposite in a way that creates a sort of snapshot of a particular cultural moment. Curiously, for Scocca, that moment seems to have occurred sometime in 2003. Why it spoke to so many people in 2013 is a phenomenon I still don’t understand. –KO

On Scocca

Let’s be honest: the only thing less appealing than the prospect of reading a 9,000-word essay is to then read someone else’s opinion on it. I, for one, would rather watch Vampire Diaries. I don’t believe that snark or smarm or the popularity of any given website is dumbing down the discourse. But as I’ve watched praise for “On Smarm” echo through my Twitter feed, I’ve come to feel there is a credible threat from “critics” so hot to make a point that they’ll forego careful arguments for half-truths, oversimplifications, and petty zings. That is performance, not criticism, and Tom Scocca is playing to the cheap seats.

“It is also no accident that [Dave] Eggers is full of shit,” he writes. This, the essay’s first pull quote, is less a sentence with meaning than a half-baked burn. Engineered to appeal to his (many) readers who already find Eggers detestable, “On Smarm” is rife with an LSAT’s worth of logical fallacies and rhetorical flimflam, relying on pseudo-philosophical trappings, heavy use of hyperbole, self-evident rants, tangential insider anecdotes, and random observations on Edward Snowden in lieu of much actual information. Presumably some other writer is cataloging it all for posterity even as I type.

I prefer to begin by interrogating the stakes of what Scocca clearly sees as his project: speaking truth to power. (Predictably, he sees this as a service only snarkers can provide.) At one point in the piece, Scocca actually invokes the word “evil,” and that judgment knocks around the rest of the essay in his strange constellation of smarmer case studies. (Squint at the first thousand words, and you might come away with the impression Eggers did 9/11.) To better understand Eggers’ tactics, Scocca says, let’s consider the technique of Smarm Lord Ari Fleisher. Is “smarmy” a fair word to use in describing both Eggers and Fleisher? I think so. But considering that one is a writer with cultural cachet and the other was the mouthpiece of an administration that bamboozled our nation into an unjust war, it sort of feels like one of these smarms is not like the other.

The basis of Scocca’s indictment of Eggers as the elitist overlord of Big Smarm—the “defining document of contemporary literary smarm,” or “manifesto,” as he also refers to it—is an email interview Eggers did with some college students in the year 2000. Consider for a moment the emails you were writing at the turn of the century. (Or, if you were never ridiculous, consider the likelihood that, were you an agent of propaganda, you would choose the Harvard Advocate as the platform for your manifesto.) Here is Scocca’s smoking gun, in case you didn’t follow his link. It’s a really entertaining read, but as the hollow heart of “On Smarm,” it’s rather less affecting. However much of a sanctimonious twit Eggers was in that interview—and make no mistake, he was a huge one—how many voices of critical dissent do you imagine his (solicited) opinion actually quelled? Let me go out on a limb and say none.

Thirteen years on from that interview, while the Dave Eggers didactic mode is still set more or less to human-equivalent-of-a-Golden-Retriever, it seems pretty clear he means well. Given his roles as a philanthropist and as a human megaphone, claiming that the Eggers agenda is silencing anyone’s voice is a reach. (In fact, in building a national network of organizations that promote literacy and writing skills, he has demonstrably worked for the opposite.) Say what you will about Eggers’ writing and his anti-snark stance. (I myself approve of both, in moderation.) The world needs a helper dog far more than someone who would kick it.

It’s not just the corrupt ringleader of Big Smarm that Scocca misrepresents. There’s also Isaac Fitzgerald, a longtime fixture on the San Francisco literary scene, whom Scocca chooses to describe only as a publicist who recently took a job as books editor at Buzzfeed. Scocca wastes little time in establishing Fitzgerald as his intellectual inferior. “For a guiding principle of 21st century literary criticism, Buzzfeed’s Fitzgerald turned to the moral and intellectual teachings of Walt Disney in the movie Bambi,” he writes. He fails to mention that as recently as May, Fitzgerald worked as the managing editor of The Rumpus, a prominent literary magazine he now co-owns with the novelist Stephen Elliott. Scocca told the truth, but only partly, and in doing so he made Fitzgerald out to be an ethically dubious rookie dingdong. Far from an oversight, he gave Fitzgerald the exact same treatment back in November.

It’s in these lies of omission that we begin to see the extent of Scocca’s intellectual dishonesty, the most noxious and damaging characteristic a critic can possess. Here’s Stephen Elliott reflecting on the piece in the daily newsletter he writes for The Rumpus:

There’s this “gotcha” moment where, because Dave didn’t visit a tech campus [to] write The Circle, it somehow contradicts something he said thirteen years earlier. It doesn’t, and even if it did, it’s not a crime for a person to contradict him/herself thirteen years down the line.

I’ve always hated that. The false integrity we try to hold each other to and judge one-another against. It doesn’t mean anything to catch someone being inconsistent. Inconsistency is human.

Elliott is Eggers’ friend and colleague—a fact that will, for some, cast doubts on the motives behind his statement. Gut check: do you think Elliott sounds defensive? Smarmy? Or do his words ring true? What sort of absurd inquisition is based on an email from 13 years ago? I love a good takedown piece of a bully or a blowhard as much as anyone, but Scocca’s smug run through the evidence feels like a surrealist monomaniac hosting Meet the Press. The Eggers “manifesto” aside, Scocca never bothers to explain why he thinks the anti-snark charters of The Believer and the Buzzfeed books section are such a threat to the critical enterprise. The piece is pegged to Fitzgerald, imbuing his hire at Buzzfeed with near mystical import. Why exactly is Scocca so worried? Because Jebediah Purdy, circa 1999? Joe Lieberman?? What? Who?

One of the strengths of experimental longform writing is the way in which whatever ideas and events are being explored start to resonate—and clash—in unexpected ways. The effects can be visceral. Scocca’s essay is of course choppy by design. It functions much like a montage in a zombie movie where we see small slices of nightmare situations unfolding in New York, in London, in Mumbai. We are to understand that smarm is happening everywhere. We are under siege. Threatened by extinction. And we must fight back.

But, as the writer Jim Behrle has observed, “There is neither a War on Christmas nor a War on Snark.” Fitzgerald’s decision to focus on positive reviews is one editor’s choice, not a blanket ban. But people get real nervous when they perceive any threat to their sacred duty to be a jerk. I could write a whole other essay on how sad and chilling I found Jacob Silverman’s “epidemic of niceness” piece for Slate Book Review or Scocca’s casually tossed off observation that “a community, even one dedicated to positivity, needs an enemy to define itself against.” But that’s another lament.

Promoting one approach to criticism is like saying there’s only one good way to write fiction—a preposterous stance. But all good-faith critiques come from a place of openness. Open, first of all, in the sense that you should be honest, but open also to the possibility that you’re wrong. Open, above all, to argument. If you’ve never changed your mind about something, chances are you’re not thinking hard enough.

Maria Bustillos, a writer who admires Scocca’s work, has described him as a blunt-force critic, which is apt. The thing about hitting someone over the head with your point is there is no pretense of having a dialogue. Instead, there is the desire to dominate. To conquer. And for all Scocca’s critical attention to the language of bullies, his own work is imbued with the same gross alpha male tone he purports to speak out against.

Last year I entered the arena of literary criticism with my own 9,000-word essay. Like “On Smarm,” it was a piece of cultural criticism that used literature to talk about politics and sincerity. (From Eggers to the George W. Bush administration, we discussed many of the same people.) Scocca, who writes every day for the same website where my piece ran, was one of the first readers to leave a comment: “Seriously…put a sock in it.” That, in my experience, is the Scocca brand of snark: telling those he disagrees with to shut up. That is not being a critic. That is being a dick.

Which is, in a nutshell, the Scocca’s brand of criticism. I wonder how many words he could write if he had something to say.